SATA vs. SCSI performance
Is SATA disk better than SCSI disk? Which has better performance?

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To answer your question about SATA vs. SCSI performance: From a performance perspective, enterprise-class UltraSCSI (SCSI) disk drives are faster in terms of latency, transfer rates and rotational speed (RPM) compared to ATA and SATA disk drives. 10,000 and 15,000 RPM SCSI disks are available for high performance applications, while most ATA and SATA disk drives are 5,400 or 7,200 RPM.

There are some 10,000 RPM SATA disk drives; however, you must look beyond RPM speed as a comparison metric. Look at average latency and transfer rates as additional criteria along with support for native command queue (NCQ) for SATA and command tag queue (CTQ) for SCSI. NCQ and CTQ enable the disk drive to process multiple and interleaved disk I/Os for better effective performance.

This was first published in June 2005